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Looking Into Mozilla's Financial Success
NewsCloud writes "'Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 million the next year [similar revenue is expected in 2006]...In 2005, the foundation created a subsidiary, the for-profit Mozilla Corporation,...mainly to deal with the tax and other issues related to the Google contract...By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent. In part, that is because Google insists on the secrecy of "its arrangement and agreements," said board member Mitch Kapor.' The NYT article compares this approach to Wikipedia's ongoing fundraisers and raises the issue of transparency in open source projects. i.e. should Firefox's 1,000 to 2,000 developers and 80,000 evangelists have full knowledge of how revenue is spent as well as the extent to which Google is able to influence strategy vs. other stakeholders."
First of all, let me tell you I have nothing against for profit corporations, specially open source ones.
But Mozilla started not as a for profit corp. It was(is) a foundation. People donated to the project because it lacked the funds. They contributed because they were interested in watching a totally open source browser succeed. It seems that now, with the creation of the for profit corporation, Mozilla has become little more than a Google subsidiary.
They are racking in the big bucks which begs the question: How is it going to be invested? Are the thousands of developers that donated and contributed to the project now going to be ignored? Are the descendants of the failed netscape project pocket all the profits at the expense of the community? Like I said, I have no problem with profit. But I do have a problem with a initially non-profit corporation making money that will benefit the selected few who declared themselves royalty.
Have you noticed that ever since Mozilla started to make the big bucks, the quality of the browser has been going downhill ever since? More crashes, more bloat, more security problems. It seems that now, they're only interested in one thing: more market share, more profits and ultimately, a strategy that is aligned with the interest of google, not the community that made the browser the success it is now.
conflict of interest and incompotence still exist, and the corporate structure helps to mitigate it.
lol.